Microsoft braced for big fines by EU

The software giant could face a tougher crackdown in Europe than it has in America

ON Sunday August 17, 1997, at 9.37pm Jeff Raikes, a senior Microsoft executive, sent an e-mail to Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest man. Buffett had been invited to a football game by Bill Gates, Raikes’s boss and the only man who is richer than Buffett.

The e-mail began with a long preamble. Raikes did not fancy the chances of Gates’s local team, the Washington Huskies, against the Nebraska Cornhuskers (he was right, they lost). Raikes, his wife Tricia and the kids had just been to Disney World, followed by a trip to Nantucket, Massachusetts, where Raikes had read the book Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, by Roger Lowenstein.

Raikes’s e-mail, now featuring in a Minnesota court case, gets down to business: “The book got me thinking ... why don’t you invest in Microsoft or high technology?” Microsoft, said Raikes, is not so different from other companies that Buffett invests